Category: HEALTH

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Haircut Heartbreak

On By samanthaIn HEALTHLeave a comment

When I was a little girl my mum used to take me to have my super-fine hair cut at the hairdresser at the top of our road in Hornchurch, “La Vivienne”. Mum would lament the fact that she had lovely thick, curly hair and here was her daughter with fine “can’t do thing with it” hair. Vivienne would agree and I would sit there feeling ashamed. VIvienne would complain that my hair was knotty and my Mum would nod sadly. I really feel sad for my five year old self when I remember this and these visits undoubtedly contributed to a life-long inferiority complex about my hair and looks in general. When I was eight we went to visit my Mum’s Auntie Nora who lived in Southport. I had never met her before and, upon being introduced, Nora remarked sharply that my hair was untidy. Mum immediately took me to a nearby hairdresser and my hair was cut into a “Purdy”, a style named after Joanna Lumley’s character in The Avengers. I was then re-presented to Nora to see if I was now acceptable. Once I reached the age of ten Mum made me have my hair cut very short. I hated it and the other girls would ask why my hair was cut like a boys. No wonder I had such little self-confidence growing up.

As a child the only hair product we had in the house was Johnson & Johnson’s “No More Tears” shampoo. I can’t remember washing my hair more than once or twice a week and it became greasy very quickly. When I was fifteen I purchased some lemon shampoo in Boots and began washing my hair every other day and it was suddenly SO much better. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty one it was usually permed at a salon in Romford Market which gave it a bit of life. Who remembers scrunch-drying their permed hair with a diffuser attachment? At twenty one I went to a very posh hairdresser in Elm Park and began to have it hi-lighted. The hairdresser was called Melanie and she was lovely. For the first time in my life I felt like my hair actually looked good. I had a well-paid job at the time and only used Paul Mitchell products. Having hair professionally coloured is a pricey business and it is probably still my biggest personal expense. A few years ago I went to a local hairdresser who declared that hi-lights are “brassy not classy” and persuaded me to have an all-over tint. It came out orange and I never went back. I actually don’t think she knew how to properly hi-light hair.

Me, aged eighteen, with my permed hair

Until the pandemic I would wash and blow dry my hair almost every day. Now it is every other day. It is still a huge chore although it dries quickly. A friend of mine can wash her hair fortnightly and it still looks bouncy and clean. It really isn’t fair. My hair is in a perpetual blonde bob of variable length, I suspect I will be wearing this way when I am eighty, if I live that long. My favourite Elvive shampoo has just been discontinued so I am using some Treseme that I picked up in the supermarket. The conditioner is actually perfect, very lightweight and rinses out easily.

So the moral of this story is be careful how you speak about your children especially when they are within earshot. If someone is unkind about them take your business elsewhere. If an elderly relative deems your child to be unacceptably unkempt then leave their stuffy old living room never to return.

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

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Migraine Misery

On By samanthaIn HEALTHLeave a comment

What does a migraine feel like? Well I suppose it is different for every sufferer. I am on the fourth day of a migraine that feels like somebody is power drilling into my left eyeball. It usually starts with a pulsating pain in my eye and radiates out to my temple, ear and neck. Sometimes my gums start throbbing as well and I feel nauseous. The pain usually lasts around four days. My prescription medication, Sumitriptan, is generally very effective but sometimes it just doesn’t work and this seems to be happening more often as of late. I rang my GP surgery a month ago for a “non-urgent” appointment and am finally booked to see a doctor next week.

I had my first migraine while having lunch with my mum in the restaurant in Debenhams department store, Romford in 1986. I was eating an egg mayonnaise sandwich and the pain just hit me out of nowhere. I can eat eggs, a couple a week, but more than that and I can expect to have a pounding head. Other triggers include processed cheese, grinding my teeth, stress, being dehydrated, being overtired, perfume and repetitive noise. Since my first attack I have seen my GP a few times but they never refer me on for a brain scan simply telling me it isn’t necessary as long as the pain doesn’t change its pattern. My GP surgery isn’t big on sending people for tests.

I sit at my computer for at least three days every week for my job, I am a Personal Assistant to a private hospital consultant, not a neurologist sadly. Like the rest of the world I also spend too much of every day pointlessly scrolling through my phone and then I will often watch an hour of something on Netflix before I go to bed. So much screen time! I have just had my eyes tested though and that doesn’t appear to be the cause.

I stopped taking HRT in the summer after I had a migraine for almost every day during July. I saw my GP who hardly even glanced in my direction and said, again, that I don’t need further investigation as the pain is the same as it has always been. He told me to come off HRT for a fortnight and see if it made a difference. Surely it would take more than a fortnight for the effects to be noticeable? Anyway I have not resumed taking it but that is another thing I want to discuss during my ten minute appointment next week. I initially started taking HRT after two five minute telephone consultations. I had read that it could be helpful in warding off dementia. There were no blood tests involved so I don’t understand how the GP knew which hormones I needed if they didn’t know which I was deficient in. I have now started waking up in the night feeling hotter than the surface of the sun so perhaps I need to restart.

During the five years proceeding my menopause I had weekly horrible migraines. My family got fed up with hearing about it. People think it is a “just a headache”. I was working in an office and I am sure the colleague I sat next to thought I was addicted to pain killers. I actually try to take as few painkillers as I can get away with but you try looking at a screen all day and making chirpy phone calls when it feels like you have a pick-axe embedded in your brain. It is different if you are at home and can go and lie in a quiet dark room but who has time to do that?

So, a rather moany post from me but I will report back after my visit to the GP. Wish me luck.

Thanks for reading,

Samantha


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M.A.C. Mineralize Skinfinish Powder & Wet ‘n’ Wild Colour Icon Lipliner

On By samanthaIn HEALTHLeave a comment

My daughter bought me this M.A.C. powder for Christmas after I dropped my brand new Clinique compact and had tried to salvage the contents by mixing the broken up powder with surgical spirit as per a YouTube tutorial . It worked perfectly but my face smelled of newly-pierced ears which wasn’t exactly pleasant. Sometimes you just have to admit defeat!

I don’t believe I have ever used a M.A.C. product before, I always find the sales assistants slightly intimidating and their beauty counters are always so busy that it is difficult to browse. I also perceive it to be a brand for younger women. They sell a variety of face powders offering different coverage and finishes. SkinFinish powder, currently £27.70, comes in a black plastic, domed compact which seems unnecessarily chunky and looks a bit cheap in my opinion. There is a very small mirror inside. Annoyingly there is no applicator at all. The powder is best applied with a brush but I did buy a couple of velour powder puff applicators from Boots for about £1.50 and I wonder why M.A.C. don’t include something like this.

I have to say that SkinFinish is the second best best pressed powder I have ever used, my all-time favourite being Lancome’s Dual Finish which appears to have been discontinued. The M.A.C. powder is very flattering on my skin. I have the shade Light. It isn’t at all chalky and just a tiny amount provides excellent, lasting coverage with a slightly dewy finish. I am seriously impressed. I would suggest, if you have skin that gets a little oily throughout the day, then another, more matte, powder in the range may be a better choice.

I purchased the Wet ‘n’ Wild lipliner purely because I needed to make a tiny purchase to qualify for free delivery on an Amazon Prime order This product was £1,75 and has turned out to be one of my favourite beauty purchases in years. The shade, Brandy Wine, is a tiny bit darker that my natural lip colour and I just fill in my entire lips with a very light layer and then go over the top with some lip balm, usually Burt’s Bees. The colour lasts for hours and looks very natural. The lipliner pencil is very long and I can’t imagine needing to replace it for years. A bargain!

Thanks for reading,

Samantha

Cover Photo by Rosa Rafael on Unsplash

Perfume Pretenders

On By samanthaIn HEALTHLeave a comment

My twenty year old daughter had some friends round and one of them walked into our house on a cloud of what of what I assumed was Chanel’s CoCo Mademoiselle. I have a love-hate relationship with this particular fragrance. I love it on anybody else but it smells slightly sour on me and is guaranteed to give me a migraine. There is a note in many Chanel fragrances that gives me a headache, I can really only wear Chance. My daughter’s friend said no way could she afford Chanel, they are all students, she was wearing Soft Iris by Marks & Spencer.

On my next visit to M & S I found the scent, priced at £10 and sprayed a tiny amount onto my wrist. An hour later it smelled prettier on me than Madomoiselle and, more importantly, no migraine! I bought a bottle. The range also includes a few other well-known perfume “dupes”. Pink Pepper is apparently a dead-ringer for Lancome’s La Vie Est Belle, a wildly popular and very sweet perfume . Fresh Mandarin supposedly smells like Caroline Herrera’s Good Girl. The girls in Ms Herrera’s fragrance campaign have to be good while the boys get to be bad, rather unimaginative gender-stereotyping in my opinion but that is beside the point, the CH perfume is lovely and it comes in a high-heeled shoe shaped bottle. There is also a Jo Malone wannabe in the range, Sea Salt and Neroli . M & S sell a pack of all the various testers for £5 which is fantastic value. I think this would make a nice little gift for a teenage girl.

Perfume is one of things that is so easy to get wrong and is is an expensive mistake if you end up with a £75 bottle of something that you no longer like after a couple of days. I have re-sold so many used-twice bottles on eBay over the years. Now I generally buy Chanel body sprays, which are around £30, because they are less strong than even the EDTs and are not headache inducing. They last for ages too as you only need to spray a tiny amount. If I am considering a new fragrance I will usually buy a sample on eBay and wear it for a couple of weeks or so before committing to a fully sized bottle but, most days, I don’t bother with perfume anymore.

While in Marks and Spencer I also bought a small make up bag for my handbag, a bargain at £6, and a delicious bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich!  

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

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L’Oreal Midnight Serum & Creams

On By samanthaIn HEALTHLeave a comment

For Christmas one of my friends sent me, via good old Amazon, a L’Oreal gift set comprising of three products from their “Midnight ” anti-aging range. I can’t remember ever seeing this range in the chemist or supermarket. I do use a couple of L’Oreal products already, their Colour Riche lipstick in the shade Taffeta is one of my favourites and I like their RevitaLift eye cream. I find myself hoping that this isn’t just ancient stock that has been languishing in a warehouse for a decade, the boxes look slightly battered and dog-eared.

The Midnight range comes in distinctive gold and black boxes brandished with the words Age Perfect Cell Renew. Inside the boxes are expensive looking smoky brown glass bottles and jars, very similar to Estee Lauder’s Night Repair range. This L’Oreal set consists of Regenerative Cream, Midnight Serum and Revitalising Care Cream. Although my friend tells me she ordered it as a set which was supposed to be in a gift box I received three separate products with no gift box although, of course, I don’t mention that.

The first product I try is the night cream. Enriched with Neohesperidine and vitamin E, the cream feels luxurious and glides on. I am very prone to migraines and fragrance is a big trigger for me. This product is very highly perfumed and I do not like the scent at all, it reminds me of Youth Dew, a perfume an aunt wore in the 1970s.  I lie in bed unable to escape the smell. Fortunately, by the third night of using it I no longer notice the whiff quite so much.  

According to L’Oreal’s website, the skin begins to repair itself in the hours around midnight. I am going to wake up to millions of new skin cells I am informed. That sounds like an entire new face which is probably exactly what I need. I read that Midnight serum is formulated with a powerful antioxidant recovery complex. The serum is gorgeous to use, comparable to the aforementioned Estee Lauder Night Repair and it feels somehow… velvety. Unfortunately, it is also quite strongly scented. It is applied via a dropper which is a little fiddly to use. It is currently priced at £15.95 on Amazon UK.

The Age Perfect Renew cream isn’t featured on the L’Oreal website at the time of me writing this so perhaps it has been discontinued. It doesn’t actually appear to be part of the Midnight range although the packaging is the same. Like the other products, it is scented with elderly lady perfume but it feels luxurious to use, thick but not greasy. I was concerned that the fragrance would irritate my skin but that hasn’t been the case at all. After about ten days of using these products my skin feels well hydrated and soft. 

Had this range not been so strongly scented I would probably repurchase but the strong smell is a deal-breaker for me. The products are otherwise pleasant to use and seem to be effective so I will definitely finish all the jars and then have shop around for something else.

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

A Lifetime of Lipsticks

On By samanthaIn HEALTHLeave a comment

Woolworths, Romford 1984 and teenage me is purchasing the best lipstick I will over own. Woolies own Evette brand in the colour “Mulberry Wine”. The perfect pinky brown which stayed on all day. If only I had known that it would be discontinued I would have bought all their stock with my pocket money. In the forty years since then I have been on the hunt for another colour I have liked so much.

It’s odd that I can remember the name of just about every lipstick I have ever owned. The first was Boots No 17 “Twilight Teaser”, a bluesh, iridescent mauve. I’m sure it looked terrible but it was certainly eye-catching. I wore it to a non-uniform day at school and every girl asked me what colour it was, a new experience for me as I definitely wasn’t known for my style. Another Boots No 17 favourite was the safer and very pretty “Poncho Pink”. I also loved the Miss Selfridge “Kiss and Make Up” range and wonder if Charlotte Tilbury took some of her inspiration from their lip-print embossed branding. I wore their “Iron Maiden” and “Copper Knobs” shades” around 1987. 

When I began to have some disposable income I graduated onto the more expensive brands. Estee Lauder “Spiced Cider”, a rust colour, was one I wore for years along with Lancome’s “Brun Nu” and “Rose Nu”. I went to a wedding around 1991 and actually asked one guest which lipstick she was wearing as I liked it so much and thought it may be “The One”. Clinique “Super Nectar”, I bought it the next day and it looked absolutely hideous on me.

I actually still have the lipstick I wore too my 1994 wedding, a rather daring matt red with incredible staying power, Rochas shade 56, it’s pictured below . I experimented with dark, blackberry colours at this time as well although always had to blot them so there was just the feintest stain left. My favourite which I also still have, although it smells a bit dubious after all these years, was Chanel Shade 36. I now buy Clinique’s Almost lipstick in Black Honey which is a very wearable balm-like tint.

Post Pandemic I seem to wear less make up but I don’t generally leave the house without a quick dusting of face-powder, usually Clinique, and a slick of some lip product or other. Loreal’s “Organza” is usually my go-to everyday lipstick or a tinted lip balm from Dr Paw Paw. I also love Estee Lauder’s “Pinkberry” which is the closest I can come to wearing a nude without looking totally washed out.

I never have been able to find a shade as perfect as my Woolies lipstick but perhaps it was just the thrill of being grown up enough to wear make up for the first time. I also hold fond memories of the little tins of four blushers sold by M & S around the same time but I certainly wouldn’t wear them now. Having said that. my make up choices have barely changed in all these years and perhaps it is time to change things up a little bit.

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

Serums and Sheet Masks

On By samanthaIn HEALTHLeave a comment

I had a big family lunch here on Sunday and, as I had made an effort with my hair and make up, I thought it would be a good time to take a new photo for my “About-Me” page on this blog. It seemed to me that I looked nice enough when I looked in the mirror but, when I took a selfie, I got quite a shock. I could not press delete fast enough. There was a big, vertical line running next to my left eye from the eyebrow to the bottom of my eye. Yikes! I sleep on my left side on a cotton pillowcase. Yes, I have read all the advice about using silk pillowcases to prevent wrinkles but I have never taken it seriously. I remember watching an episode of “The Real Housewives of Beverley Hills” (don’t judge me) and Lisa Rinna, clearly pumped full of fillers and Botox, said she only slept on her back because “this face can’t be smooshed”. Well I smoosh my face every night.

Sunday night I tried sleeping on my back to avoid unnecessary smooshing but I felt like I was lying in a coffin. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my arms and ended up crossing them over my chest just to enhance the corpse effect. Clearly this isn’t going to be something I can commit to in the long run.

My usual bed-time skin care routine is cleanse, apply serum and moisturise. I use an eye cream during the day because, if I apply one at night time, I always wake up with stinging eyes, no matter how hypoallergenic the brand. For the past year I have been using a pricey Judith Williams serum but have just run out and have been looking for a replacement. December being such an expensive month, I bought myself a budget option from Simple, their 10% Vitamin C + E + F Booster Serum. This product has a plethora of five star reviews on Amazon and costs only £5.33 for 30mls. I buy a lot of Simple products for my teenagers but usually spend a bit more on my own skincare. The product comes in a very basic white plastic bottle with a dropper to suck up the liquid. To be honest, I have seen more glamorous looking bottles of eye drops but of course it is the quality of the product that really matters. The serum is a white liquid with a slightly unpleasant smell which I can’t really describe. The liquid is very watery and ran down my face until I massaged it in. I have to say, once smoothed on, my skin felt soft and velvety. I followed by applying the moisturiser that I’m currently using, CeraVe Skin Renewing Night Cream. Because the serum is so inexpensive I have also been using it on my hands which take a lot of battering. It’s too early to report back on any real results but at £5.33 it is worth a try.

The other new product that I have tried this week is a sheet mask by Korean beauty brand Seoulista which I bought from Oliver Bonas for £11.99 Quite pricey for a single-use beauty product but the mask is drenched in 30mls of serum, the same amount as in the entire bottle by Simple. The product’s full, rather grandiose, title is Beauty Advanced Clinic Formulation Diamond Radiance Instant Facial. I ran a hot bath and arranged the mask over my face, it felt gorgeously cool and smooth. Twenty minutes later my skin looked plumper, smoother and glowing. Being a bit thrifty, I wrapped the mask in clingfilm and used it on my neck following evening with similar results. I will definitely be buying more from this brand.

Obviously my big, vertical eye wrinkle isn’t going anywhere but I did notice it is less visible as the day progresses. I suppose, as we age, our skin takes longer to spring back into shape. Something to do with collagen no doubt, maybe I will investigate some supplements. I expect the only real solution would be Botox. As having injections next to my eyes isn’t something that appeals to me and is probably very expensive, I will be ordering the aforementioned silk pillowcase to see if this makes any difference.

Thank you for reading,

Samantha

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